New Version of Wirecast Brings Closed Captions and Restreaming to Live Production

Nevada City, California, September 5, 2018 – Telestream, a leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, today announced version 10 of Wirecast, Telestream’s award-winning live streaming and production software for Mac and Windows. The new version adds support for restreaming and live captioning workflows with the introduction of Wirecast Live Captions and Wirecast Restream, two new web services hosted on Telestream Cloud.

With the release of these new web services for Wirecast customers, Telestream aims to solve two of the most common issues facing live streamers today: the creation of captions for live events and the need for efficient multi-platform distribution, even when upload bandwidth is limited. Wirecast Live Captions is the perfect tool for improving accessibility to live streams for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, and provides affordable, CEA-608 formatted, RTMP-embedded closed captioning to Wirecast streams.

Live Captions uses advanced machine learning-based speech-to-text engines to listen and transcribe the audio from your streams in real-time. Once the speech is transcribed, Telestream’s award-winning captioning technology embeds that text in correctly formatted, compliant CEA-608 closed captions within the RTMP stream, and then distributes it to any destination – all completely within the cloud. This allows any stream generated in Wirecast 10 or later to contain discreet, closed captioning which can be displayed from any closed-captioning compatible web-player.

“Compliant, formatted and embedded 608 live captioning has traditionally been out of reach or too expensive for most live productions and streamers,” said Tom Prehn, Product Manager, Telestream. “This level of quality at an affordable price point is an industry first.”

Although machine-generated, the Wirecast Live Captions service is capable of a high degree of accuracy. When working with clear and intelligible source material, Live Captions is over 90% accurate. Wirecast’s Live Captions service is currently available for 5 languages, including: English (US), English (UK), French, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Spanish.

The other web service, Wirecast Restream, allows users to simulcast their streams to multiple destinations and platforms without sacrificing quality, bandwidth or computing resources. A single upload stream can be “restreamed” to multiple online platform destination platforms using the established architecture of Telestream’s cloud-based media processing ecosystem. Previously, streaming to multiple destination platforms required a powerful workstation to handle multiple simultaneous encode requirements for each destination. A significant network upload connection would also have been necessary to propagate each custom stream to its destination.

“The Restream service allows users to stream to multiple destinations without affecting their bandwidth or processing resources – or even their Wirecast workflows,” said Scott Murray, VP Product Management at Telestream. “With Wirecast 10, it’s now possible to use a much lighter weight computer such as a laptop and a standard internet connection to accomplish a larger multi-platform streamed event.”

Along with the compute and bandwidth advantages it offers, Wirecast Restream is convenient and simple to implement. It allows users to restream to multiple destinations by using a simple check box menu. When users add an output destination in Wirecast, they can decide if they want Restream to deliver the feed for them. Wirecast automatically propagates the correct login credentials and RTMP publishing points to Restream, without the user needing to leave the Wirecast interface.

“We intentionally designed Wirecast 10 so users don’t have to change their workflow to harness these services,” said Prehn. “Users simply sign up for a Telestream Cloud account, add their intended destinations in Wirecast, as they always have, and check the “Enable Restream & Captions” check box for that destination. That’s it.”